State of the Art

A lot has happened in those two years, to me, to the Internet, and to the art of webzines. artwork copyright rrmallory

I went looking the other day to add to my Suite 101 stable of webzine links, and what I found was a whole bunch of ghost sites. It's sad and lonely out there in the far reaches of the Internet, where dead zines, like ghost towns, yield up secrets and surprises. One almost expects to see a virtual tumbleweed blown through by the wind, or hear the sad cries of the abandoned stories, many of which were exceptional.

After visiting so many ghost links, I wondered if there were any on my list of reviewed zines. So I checked them, and was horrified at the results.
E-scape
Eternity
Orphic-Chronicle
Albedo
Digital Catapult (eulogy on site)
Event Horizon(site's still up)
First Light (now Italics... a writer's zine, no fiction)
Galaxy (says it's sold... confusing)
Ideomancer
Millennium (site's still up)
are all either dead or appear abandoned.

Neverworlds' URL has changed to http://www.neverworlds.com/

Fantasy, Folklore and Fairytales states that it's on hiatus while the owners move.

Ack! Where are the webzines?

Have they gone the way of the dot com economy? On a few sites, the editors have left an explanation. Usually somewhere in their eulogy is the phrase "labor of love," and I guess that's the problem.

Labors of love get really tiresome after a while when nobody seems to appreciate them. And despite what naysayers think, it is not free, nor even cheap, to run an electronic magazine, or to be an electronic book publisher. The long hours and sleepless nights are just as bad for a webzine or an e-publisher as they are for the print ones, perhaps moreso.

In the next few months, I will be updating links, searching out new webzines, and continuing to provide a monthly review of zines.

Anyone who has updated information, or knows of a great new SF/F webzine, please write me a note.

Thanks. See you next month.

God bless America.

Rickey

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